Fantasy Images and the Beauty Inside: Some Musings on an August Afternoon
By Emily Alford
Female, male, or someplace in between, everybody but everybody in the western world is bombarded by images of female allure. Much of the imagery is commercial. Cute little girls, fresh ingenues, sexy vamps, cool professional women, warm mother figures, elegant matrons: these sell clothes for both sexes, as well as music, films, cars, houses, magazines, cosmetics, alcohol, cigarettes, jewelry, and the sort of dreams that a person wishes money really could buy.
That includes selling womanly dreams of being as lovely as she who is in the picture, as effortlessly pretty as the model who in fact is carefully prepped, dressed, made up, taped, posed, and lit. Such imagery can appeal to male lust, even if woman-oriented products are on sale. Just pick up a Vicky’s Secret Catalog. But any sensible woman understands that beauty-industry imagery and the lives most people live most of the time do not always intersect. She realizes that bringing about such an intersection can take as much effort as prepping a model and that costume and cosmetics are not what make her herself. That is true whether the woman is born, or surgeon-and-hormone made, or part-time.
Recently, though, I’ve seen a beauty-industry ad that comes close to speaking the truth. I noticed it in Vanity Fair, which I read sometimes, but it probably has run elsewhere. It’s for the lingerie line also called Vanity Fair and it plays with the conventions of beauty advertising in some interesting ways.
The photos in the two-page, front-of-the-book, prestige spread are conventional enough. Against a black background, a woman poses in the bra and panties set the ad is intended to sell. One image has her seated on a chaise lounge, with sumptuously folded silk half surrounding her. Her arms are open, as if to embrace. Her legs, however, are curled to the side, knee to knee, with one ankle held behind the other. She looks to the side as well. The other photo has the same model head-and-shoulders, facing the camera directly, with a small smile playing on her closed mouth. Despite the intimacy of her costume, she shows no sexual availability in either pose. This is not the sort of lingerie ad that is intended to provoke a desirous male gaze.
The model is interesting as well. Her body is elegant, but she is well
past her youth. In the head-and-shoulders close-up we see that she has
lines at the edges of her eyes, and around her mouth. She is elegantly
made-up but without any pretense that youth can be recovered from a
bottle. Her cosmetics simply bring out the face behind which this woman
has lived, probably for as long as the fifty-four years I have lived
behind mine. Interesting, too, is the accompanying text: "There comes a
time in life when finally (how long has it taken?) you are simply true to
yourself. Like breathing, you instinctively follow your truest impulse .
. . and you trust that truth inside and it shows in the beauty that you,
finally, own. At last, you’re comfortable."
The obvious parallel is with being transgender all one’s remembered life
and, at last, being entirely comfortable with it. Just on that count, and
in thanks, I’m going to buy myself something from Vanity Fair. But it
strikes me that the ad says more. I certainly picked up overtones of what
my own father used to say decades ago, when I was a very troubled
trying-to-be-a-boy: "To thine own self be true." (Did he or my mother
have any inking why I had that eczema and hated the school playground?
I’ll never know.) I coped then by playing the role of "brain." Now I'm a
scholar and I picked up overtones not only of my father but of the
nineteenth-century American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson. I recall Emerson
writing somewhere that indeed the task is to be true, to show oneself
somehow for whatever one is, whether the showing be discrete or overt. I
don’t have a complete Emerson handy, and couldn’t find what I wanted in
the few essays of his on my shelves. But I did find him writing "on
Beauty," and saying there that "Veracity, first of all, and forever. Rien
de beau que le vrai [nothing is beautiful that is not true]" which is
close enough to what I remembered, and, perhaps to Vanity Fair’s ad.
Next to that volume sat a complete Walt Whitman and I started leafing
through it. (Yes, I meant that pun.) In his great "Song of Myself" I
found him writing "I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, and I
say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man," but I knew that line was
there and I was looking for it. What seemed more in line with the truth
that Vanity Fair’s adwriter proclaimed was Whitman's large project. Many
poets before him had tried to capture and express the unique,
unprecedented truth about America. Almost invariably, they failed,
falling into the trap of imitating their European forerunners in subject
matter and style alike. Whitman understood that his world was different
from any that had gone before, and that he needed a new poetic style to do
that world justice. Only when he found that style could he express the
truth inside, sing of all the selves he was, and show to the world the
beauty that he, finally, owned.
It isn’t often that a piece of advertising copy produces a train of
thought. An ad’s job, after all, is to induce a signature on a credit
card form. Perhaps this particular lingerie ad was written by a graduate
in American lit who was subtly showing off.. No problem if so: classical
composers and great bluesmen get ripped off for sales purposes too. But
the ad did express a truth that my father, Emerson, and Whitman all
perceived, and that every transgender person ought to feel in the bones.
Only if we trust the truth inside can we own our beauty
and, at last be comfortable
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